Travel

AFTER THE MANY DELIGHTS of Hanoi, I took a bus three hours’ northwards to Dong Dang at the Vietnamese border with China. Here, I walked the short limbo of no-man’s land into the People’s Republic of China; my first visit to the country.

China is absolutely enormous! It’s the third biggest country by land mass in the world. It borders a staggering 14 countries: Vietnam, Laos, Burma, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and North Korea. It’s the most populous country in the world with more than 1.3 billion people; to put that into some perspective, that’s more than 20% of the world or more than one in five of all people on the planet. The PRC officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Han Chinese, who make up about 92% of the total population. Large ethnic minorities include the Zhuang (16 million), Manchu (10 million), Hui (9 million), Miao (8 million), Uyghur (7 million), Yi (7 million), Tujia (5.75 million), Mongols (5 million), Tibetans (5 million), Buyei (3 million), and Koreans (2 million). China is a one-party state controlled by the Communist Party of China, and is one of the last 5 remaining communist states in the world, along with Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba.

The land border crossing at Dong Dang/Pingxiang was the first time on my trip that I saw guards with serious weaponry; each Chinese soldier had assault rifles and every bus was thoroughly checked. Having been through Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam without so much as a grumpy word from the generally bored-looking border officials, this was how border crossing should be. I wasn’t to stay long in China on this occasion; I was continuing by bus to Nanning and from there jumping onto another bus to the Chinese border with Hong Kong at Shenzhen. (Just in case anyone wants to do this journey, whilst no-one (including, disconcertingly, border officials) had heard of it, a bus trip from Hanoi to Hong Kong does exist – just ask around Hanoi travel agents. It takes just 24 hours in total with a free supper). It was a four hour bus ride to Nanning. Nanning bus station is absolutely massive and, completely surreally, had as a music policy, the interminable Celine Dion song from Titanic on repeat loop at full blast for the three hours I was there. Here, I was very well looked after by very kind ladies who, despite a mutual lack of understanding, ensured that I was put safely on the sleeper bus to Hong Kong.

Beijing

After a few days back in Hong Kong, I boarded a sleeper train with my cousin, Jerry, at Kowloon Station to Beijing and, within two hours, we were over the border into China, in the province of Guangdong.

Undoubtedly, I was entering China with preconceptions (many negative) particularly having recently spent time in Hong Kong and also after years of exposure to the international media. Hong Kong is particularly suspicious of Chinese intent and every action that could be seen to have any impact on Hong Kong is intensely scrutinised by the Hong Kong media and by the Hong Kong people. Prior to the handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong had been under British governance having been ceded to Britain under a 99 year lease following the Opium Wars. It was agreed between China and Britain in 1984 that, following the handover, Hong Kong would retain a degree of autonomy (in contrast to the rest of China) and that stability within the island would be guaranteed for the 50 years post-handover. Despite these assurances from China, there’s the keenly-felt perception in Hong Kong that Beijing is attempting to quietly downgrade Hong Kong’s global importance, for example, by raising Shanghai’s significance and prominence through heavy promotion of its port and through its fast-growing importance as the financial centre of mainland China, all the while, whilst neglecting to attend to the parallel interests of Hong Kong. In addition to these fears, many Hong Kong people also have prejudices (to differing degrees) about the mainland mostly alluding to a lack of sophistication on the part of its inhabitants. The challenge to, constant re-evaluation of, and joyful overturn of these preconceptions began on that sleeper train and all the way along my journey through this incredible country.

This was my first ever sleeper train journey; my compartment was narrow, had two triple bunks on the sides of it and I was on one of the two uppermost beds. You climb on top of the other beds to get there. The bed was surprisingly comfortable (even without space to sit up). Sleeper trains are great fun; everyone either hangs out in the compartment or in the narrow communal corridor shared by all the other compartments in the carriage. I’d heard about them from my time in Hong Kong, but this was the first time I’d seen squat toilets in China. Apparently, they’re (surprisingly) very popular amongst the mainland Chinese; I later read that this is because it’s supposed to be a more natural position for that sort of thing!

We arrived at Beijing West’s massive railway station after just 25 hours on the train and headed straight for the Dongcheng district, a central area, just to the east of the Forbidden City which is the very heart of Beijing. Our hostel was in a ‘hutong’; part of the fantastic culture of Beijing’s fascinating hutong system. (A hutong is a street or alleyway dating back from the 1200s when the invading and all-conquering Mongols rebuilt the city, having razed much of it to the ground during their pillage. Generally, a hutong is a low-rise, tree-lined street of beautiful grey walls and classical courtyards; they’re a total antidote to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong and Bangkok.) The hutongs are dotted all around the city and one of the most famous is the Nanluoguxiang (NLGX) hutong.

NLGX is one of the new cultural centres of Beijing; full of alternatives and creatives and is completely on-the-button-bang-up-to-date in terms of style. People there were sporting a look I haven’t seen anywhere outside Beijing; it was utilitarian, interestingly cut, both fitted and unstructured, in muted colours, layered, and many things besides. There’s so much going on in this hutong; there are interesting and quirky cool bars, excellent hole-in-the-wall food stalls, great independent shops selling beautiful leather goods, notebooks, fantastic stationary, brilliant visual art, shops famous for cheesy yoghurt and so much more. It’s literary, cultured and immensely creative. The Government is now trying to recreate the success of NLGX in other hutongs (unfortunately, it made a mistake with a hutong just to the south of Tiananmen Square which is sadly empty) in stark contrast to recent policy which tried to redevelop (read demolish!) the hutongs. Thankfully, the Government is now trying to preserve important historical and cultural sites (and sights).

The food in Beijing is amazing. Having been brought up on Cantonese food, it was a welcome surprise to discover the many different styles that actually comprise the full range of Chinese food. In the famous Donghuamen night market in Dongcheng, I enjoyed food from all China such as heavily spiced lamb kebabs from Xinjiang in the far-west of China (and much in the news recently in 2009), superb dumplings with a huge variety of delicious fillings (pork, mushrooms, beef and water chestnuts) and casings (steamed or fried), gorgeous rotten beancurd (although less pungent than the kind found in Hong Kong’s Mongkok), and steamed sticky glutinous rice cooked inside bamboo sticks; I did though steer clear of trying the Xinjiang dish of barbequed lamb testicles; these are huge things, about the size of a cricket ball!

As usual, I also hunted out the hole-in-the-wall type of establishment and, for breakfast, enjoyed braised donkey meat served in panini-style bread: absolutely delicious; tastes a little bit like horse (only joking).

In the hutongs, we also discovered true Sichuan-style hot-pot; a soup made up of chillies (to make you sweat rivers) and with enough peppercorns to actually numb all feeling in your mouth, your lips and your throat. A pot of this fiery broth is placed in a hole in your table over a fire, slowly reducing the soup (to a thick, gelatinous conclusion), and you dip meats and vegetables, mushrooms (such as a chewy, stringy but delicious white fungus which, sponge-like, soaks up all the broth), beancurds and noodles into the pot. The sweat comes on almost immediately and even the cheap and excellent Yanjing local beer doesn’t help quench the heat; it only exacerbates it. Further down the side-streets, there are fantastic street stalls with another kind of broth and hot-pot; this time, the meats etc. come served with sesame paste, incredibly fiery raw garlic and impossibly hot chilli oil – delicious! We became regulars at this stall in the next hutong down from our hostel with the ubiquitous tiny stools, shirtless card-playing locals egging us on to take more chilli. The shirtless local is a bit of a Hong Kong stereotype of mainland Chinese people, that they roll their shirts up over their bellies and scratch themselves, much like a cat does, and then spit everywhere. It’s absolutely true and also great, invigorating fun to emulate; it’s so relaxing to throw off normal social practices in public!

The nightlife is brilliant in Beijing, particularly in the NLGX area and in the nearby Sanlitun district. The range of bars is huge in NLGX; there’s (allegedly) the smallest bar in China (to be fair to it, it is just a tiny bar with standing room only!); there’s another bar with gorgeous velvet armchairs with kung-fu movies on the projector screen; there’s a massive bookstore with a huge bar in it (or should that be a huge bar with a massive bookshop in it?); there’s bars serving just German beers; the bar next door just Belgian beers; there’s a bar selling just shots and nothing else; and in a warren of lanes in Sanlitun, great dive bar after great dive bar. The bars are mostly quirky and definitely independent; I haven’t seen this type of overtly cool and interesting bar culture since Melbourne.

Beijing is packed full of sights that probably make up much of the world’s top 20 sights to see; in particular (and in no particular order), the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and, of course, the Great Wall of China, part of which wraps itself around the city around 60km to the north. I couldn’t wait to see the Forbidden City; its legend, its history, its sheer scale and majesty that I’d only gleaned from books as a child meant that I walked into the City with an unconcealed excitement and a sense that I was stepping back into history. The Forbidden City is a massive complex of ancient buildings built over centuries and dating back to the Ming Dynasty. No-one except royalty or permitted officials were allowed to set foot inside the Forbidden City upon pain of death. We started from the north at the Shenwu Gate and made our way through the complex towards Tiananmen Square. It was a blisteringly hot day and the accompanying blindingly azure blue skies made for fantastic pictures including, of course, the classic and iconic shot with us in the foreground and the extraordinary Hall of Supreme Harmony, with its beautiful double roof, in the background. The architecture in the Forbidden City was majestic and the level of detail in the richly coloured and intricately ornate beam work in the roofing was sublime.

It was incredible to walk around a place that had been closed to visitors for 500 years, and even more mind-blowing to think that this stunning complex was built all those years ago. We exited the Forbidden City at the South Gate and took a photograph with the huge, iconic portrait of Chairman Mao smiling beatifically behind us. In front of us was the huge landscape of Tiananmen Square. I looked around for that road where the famous scene during the student pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 took place, when a (still) unknown man stepped in front of a tank column forcing it to stop; I couldn’t identify it. Today, there’s nothing in the square to remind visitors of the massacre; you’ll just see the massive Mao mausoleum to the south, the Great Hall of the People to the west; and an as yet unopened museum to the east of the square.

We also visited the stupendous Summer Palace; a monument built during the last years of the Qing Dynasty, the last Dynastic rulers of China. The cost of building the Summer Palace was apparently astronomical; it features an enormous man-made lake, a sumptuous residence and a richly decorated and majestic temple. The Palace witnessed the dying days of the Qing, when the ruling order was subverted, to the extent that the Dowager Empress Cixi imprisoned her son, the rightful Emperor, in the Palace. The entire place seems to bear out the old adage: decadence before the fall.

After just a week, it was time to leave Beijing. Beijing is absolutely awesome and is a total must-see for travellers! I love it! I’ve heard from people a common complaint about Beijing, one that’s usually levelled at cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai; namely that it’s a bit ‘fast’. I always hesitate to use that description of a city because so often this is a thinly disguised euphemism for ‘modern and soulless’ and the reality of Beijing couldn’t be further from this perception. Beijing is totally different from the likes of ‘fast’ cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bangkok etc. Of course, it’s modern and, for the most part, technologically current, but this is always a firm second and subordinate to its dominant cultural aspects. I definitely don’t see the rampant commercialism that I see in Shanghai or Bangkok, and Beijing is infinitely the better for it. Instead, at all moments you’re there, you just know that you’re standing in one of the ancient capitals of China (others include Xian (home of the Terracotta Warriors) and Kaifeng), in one of the oldest surviving civilisations, and Beijing simply drips with impossibly weighty history and unique cultures (both ancient and modern) with some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met and some of the best food I’ve ever eaten – just perfect, perfect travelling ingredients. Beijing is absolutely brilliant; oozing history, seething with creativity and with more than an eye on its future as the centre of the world’s next superpower. I’ll definitely return in the next few years.

   

I couldn’t leave Hanoi and Vietnam without taking a quick trip to Halong Bay eastwards on the coast at the Gulf of Tonkin; eventually, after days of gentle cajoling, Lee finally managed to sell me a tour there. Halong Bay is a truly beautiful spot and a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site: gorgeous blue waters heavily punctuated with forested limestone karsts rising out of the sea. There are more than 2,000 of these little islands and the sight is something out of a James Bond movie.

I joined an overnight tour on an imitation junk boat which chuntered gently around the islands. We stopped off at a vast limestone cave system on one of the islands; I’d seen quite a few of these caves on my trip but they’re still awe-inspiring. We stopped off for the afternoon at a makeshift jetty from where we jumped into kayaks and explored a couple of the smaller islands around the bay.

That afternoon, as the sun began to drop, we climbed a mountain on one of the biggest islands where, at the top, we feasted on some unforgettable views across the limestone islands dotted around the impossibly turquoise blue waters of Halong Bay. That evening, from the deck of the boat, we watched the sun go down over the horizon with an ice-cold sweet Vietnamese beer – a fantastic trip.

I left Hanoi and Vietnam with a slightly heavy heart. I could have stayed there for several more weeks, perhaps even months, and I saw how many people could relocate for much longer periods. It’s easily one of my very favourite countries.

I said goodbye to Jon in Saigon; he was going to take the ‘hop-on, hop-off’ bus up the coast with a fairly flexible timeframe of arriving in Hanoi in a few weeks. I was in a bit of rush to get back to Hong Kong so I took an internal flight to Hanoi in the north of Vietnam; a place that has strong family associations, being the place where my dad and four of his six brothers and sisters were born during the Second World War, as his family were unable to return to Hong Kong, which at the time was under Japanese occupation.

I flew into Hanoi Airport and headed straight for the famed Old Quarter. The first hostel I checked into was a complete fleapit so I moved myself into the infinitely better Liberty Hostel run by two lovely women, Rose and Lee, who were fantastic people to know during my stay in Hanoi. Rose, took me under her wing and would recommend things to try and places to visit. She’d take me to local hangouts such as random alleyways where a makeshift restaurant had set up an impromptu business serving classic Vietnamese dishes such as cold white noodles with a sweet soupy dressing or to ramshackle, charming tea-stalls on the pavement with large blocks of ice and tiny, plastic stools or miniscule drinks bars tucked behind another shop where she’d tell me about Vietnamese culture, history and what she loved about her city.

She and her small son, Minh, took me to the Hoa Lo Prison (also known more ironically as the Hanoi Hilton) where American prisoners of war (including Senator John McCain) were held. They also took me for an exhilarating and memorable scooter ride around Hanoi, around the huge lake, through tiny side streets and through the teeming throngs, bumping into fellow scooter riders and dodging pedestrians.

Just walking around Hanoi is incredible. The Old Quarter is an impossibly charming, disarming and elegant place; it’s a maze of gorgeous tree-lined streets of pretty low-rise houses, shops, cafes, restaurants, art galleries and temples all operating at a perceptibly slower pace of life than Saigon; a pace of life which, whilst still frenetic, seems focused less upon rampant commercialism and more upon the good life, with an awesome street culture where everything seems to happen on the pavement, such as outside a house, hostel, café etc, and whilst on the pavement, drinking great coffee, eating superb food, playing Chinese chess, smoking, peeling vegetables, posing on your motorbike, socialising with your neighbours, having a welcome ice-cold beer etc.; just watching Hanoi life go by. It’s just all so elegant! This elegance is perhaps best epitomised by the Hanoi womenfolk, who wear beautifully crafted silk pyjamas at any time of the day in vibrant colours and ornate embroidery just going about their daily lives, on foot or on scooters.

In Hanoi, it’s easy to spend hours and hours just strolling the streets, absorbing the bustle, admiring the famous silk shops, checking out the huge local art scene with countless galleries (the art scene is huge in Hanoi and visitors are warmly welcomed by galleries who heavily promote local artists. Much of the art is aimed at tourists, with plenty of images of traditional Vietnamese headwear on lacquered wood, but there is a wealth of younger artists dominating Hanoi galleries with exciting fusions of traditional subject matter with techniques and influences from around the world. I was particularly struck by the impressionistic art of Lee Minh Duc), friendly haggling with vendors, stopping at tiny street stalls for some of the finest coffee I’ve ever tasted (as with the coffee I enjoyed in Siem Reap, Vietnamese coffee is drip-fed from a filtered container and produces some of the strongest, thickest and ‘nuttily’ delicious caffeinated rocket fuel I’ve ever tasted. Many in Vietnam take this with condensed milk but I prefer it without – a great kickstart to the morning!), pulling up a tiny stool outside a bia hoi (beer house) and gulping down delicious local draught, poking your head into a beautifully preserved local temple, eating fantastically aromatic and mouth-watering food in the street stalls or local ‘hole-in-the-wall’ joints and so on and so on!

The food in Vietnam is immense! It’s my favourite of the many foods that I’ve encountered so far on my travels; it’s so delicate and fragrant and yet still packs in huge amounts of flavour. Its key ingredients are garlic, sugar, fish sauce, chillies, lemon grass, coriander and mint. Pho is the national dish; it’s a delicious rice noodle and beef soup. The noodles are made from rice flour and water. The broth is a complex, time-consuming (to brew) nourishing elixir made from various bones, vegetables and herbs. The beef is thinly sliced and raw; it’s partially cooked by the heat of the stock poured over it immediately before serving. It’s lavishly served with garnishes like bean-sprouts, basil leaves, limes, and of course chillies.

My favourite eating place was just off the lake; it was a tiny, nondescript restaurant with small plastic tables and tiny, kid-sized stools with a large food counter. You just point at what you want and sit down. Everything would be served with complimentary rice and a thin vegetable soup for contrast. My favourite dishes there were these fantastic steamed parcels of pork and ginger wrapped in Chinese cabbage leaves and delicious tomato-based fish stews; absolutely superb and best served liberally doused in traditional Vietnamese condiments such as mountains of chilli oil, crushed garlic and fish sauce. From here, I’d stroll to the next street to sit on the pavement outside a stall and enjoy crushed ice, chopped fruit and condensed milk in a tall glass for dessert. Then, as the sun would begin to set, I’d head off to a bia hoi to drain a couple of beers. Afterwards, I’d walk it all off with an explore around the many night markets all over town.

Clothes had become my preferred souvenir the further I travelled and t-shirts had become my favourite. God, I’d become a walking cliché! So I also went in for scarves and Vietnamese slippers. I’d had my eye on a bespoke suit since I went into a tailor’s shop in Saigon. Hoi An, between Hanoi and Saigon, is probably the most famous place in Vietnam for suit-making, but there are concerns amongst consumers about quality. In the end, I went to Duc Nhuan in the Old Quarter on Hang Manh Street where a ridiculously young tailor fitted me for a suit. She fashioned two cashmere suits to my specification (slim fit, double vents, and working cuff buttons) for an absolute fraction of the price a bespoke suit would have cost in England. This huge cost differential can’t just be about the relative cheapness of things in Vietnam and the wider South-East Asia. It just reinforces my thinking that things are just too expensive in the West. When the quality of production can be as good as this for this little money, it’s easy to see why so many companies outsource all manner of business to the developing world.

Before I left Hanoi, I visited the immense Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum where the preserved body of the revered and beloved father of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, rests in perpetuity. It’s a slightly macabre sight, filing past in single file the slightly garishly lit mummy.

After about thirty seconds, you’re whisked away to the exit. Afterwards, whilst on a moped, I saw a huge statue of Lenin, the main architect of the Russian Revolution, erected on a random and unheralded square. Of course, I had to take a picture with the old Commie!

It’s a lesser-known fact that Vietnam is one of the few remaining Communist nations in the world today. It’s a single-party state which, whilst not in-your-face, has enough vestiges of socialist iconography and imagery that pervades everyday living. You also can’t miss the red flags and socialist starred t-shirts; all for tourists; I was unable to resist.